Strange Artefact [Michigan Relics]

[uzn]

While sorting my Harddrives I found an old image I got from a p2p source about 20 years back. Only hint I got is the filename which says Michigan. Could be either Ufo or ancient civilisation related. Anyone seen this or similar objects ?



The White spots in the Image are supposed to be black. Since the fileformat is gif it takes the pure black and displays it as transparent. (really old)

[Justplain]

I wonder whether Klaus Donna might be able to help you identify what this is a picture of? Bill did an excellent interview with him on Camelot, and Klaus's Out Of Place ('OOP') artifacts had some interesting pieces that remind me of this one. The dark stone i believe is quite hard, perhaps harder than granite. The caligraphy may relate to the script that has been found around the globe in pre-megalithic artifacts (ie. from the most recent pre-deluvian global civilization).

[Valerie Villars]

How do you know it's old? i mean no disrespect and it is an earnest question, but I thought stone couldn't, on it's own merit outside of its surrounding geographical context, be dated? I mean, unless it had been handled over time, thereby leaving grooves, etc, but even then it would be a very iffy guess.

[Chanie]

I think I found the image on: http://michiganrelics.com
It’s the fourth photo from the top.

This is an article about it:
http://now.wktv.org/fantastic-riches...chigan-relics/

It indicates that it is from the Mertz-Deal collection. If you put the words “Michigan Relics” into a search engine, you should find more information.

[norman]

The "H" shape immediately made me think of those ruined stone blocks in south America that are "H" shaped.

[Valerie Villars]

I don't know. I'm just not convinced. I'd need to do some more research. Thank you for posting uzn. Stones interest me very much, ever since I was a little girl. I know Michigan has a much longer history than the official one. Just what it is, needs to be unearthed.

[Chanie]

As far as I can tell without doing extensive research, the Michigan Relics may be a hoax.

Near the end of Betty Sodders’ book entitled Michigan Prehistory Mysteries, she writes a section on “Hoax or History-Fake or Find.” She writes about the Soper fraud which involved “an extensive massive production of professionally forged artifacts that took place between 1880 and 1911.” She also mentions that Dr. Mertz believed them to be authentic.

You can get a Kindle version of Sodders’ book at Amazon.

Or you can watch this documentary entitled Hoax or History: The Michigan Relics.

See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x7piGEiPs8I

[DeDukshyn]

Posted by Valerie Villars (here)
How do you know it's old? i mean no disrespect and it is an earnest question, but I thought stone couldn't, on it's own merit outside of its surrounding geographical context, be dated? I mean, unless it had been handled over time, thereby leaving grooves, etc, but even then it would be a very iffy guess.

Well, he actually only said the photo and digital image was old, and merely suggested that the artifact might be old.

[Chanie]

I watched the documentary. The image is featured a number of times in the film including a close-up shot at the 42:45 mark.

At 34:32, Richard Stamps talks about a paper that he wrote entitled, “Tools Leave Marks: Material Analysis of the Scotford-Soper-Savage Michigan Relics.”

You can read it here: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/...&context=byusq

Stamps’ conclusion was that most, if not all, of the artifacts were fakes. The evidence seems to suggest that Scotford and Soper were creating them for profit.

However, the documentary suggests that the Mertz relics may predate Scotford and Soper, but then goes on to state that the Mertz artifacts seem to have come from Prof. Worth who ran a curiosity museum in Indiana and that he was in Detroit up until 1906. No one knows where Worth got his artifacts, but the fact that he was in Detroit at the same time as Scotford-Soper might suggest that he purchased the relics from them.

This makes sense to me. If you were running a curiosity museum back then, would you care if the relics were real or fake?

Having watched the documentary, I think it’s fair to say that the Scotford-Soper fraud has muddied the water when it comes to these artifacts. They “discovered” up to 9000 items. If there is a genuine artifact out there, it will be like looking for the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack.

[amor]

Just the way the photo was presented suggested to me that if it is a real artifact, it may be a measuring tool, possibly astronomical.

[pueblo]

Posted by norman (here)
The "H" shape immediately made me think of those ruined stone blocks in south America that are "H" shaped.

Look a little like a Maronite Cross too..

[Chanie]

At 23:42 in the documentary, David Deal, who has studied the Mertz collection, indicates that the inscription on many of the stones is Paleo Hebrew for YHW or Yahweh. He believes that the followers of Bishop Arius fled Egypt and travelled to Michigan in the early 4th Century and states that he has dated one tablet to July 352 C.E.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=x7piGEiPs8I

On page 455-456 of the book Lost Cities of North & Central America, David Hatcher Childress writes about the Mertz collection. He indicates that Mertz believed that the artifacts “were the work of 4th century A.D. Nestorian Christians who had fled from the Middle East and Mediterranean area at the time of the signing of the Nicene Creed, in order to escape religious persecution and conflict.”

See: https://davidhatcherchildress.com/lo...tral-america-0

[Smell the Roses]

It's been a while since I looked into the Michigan Relics, but it seems quite clear they were a hoax. The way I remember it is that the leaders of this effort would go to a new town, find the most important people in town, take them to a location and then miraculously find new relics in that area within a short period of time of starting the search. Also, one of the children of one of these "discoverers" made a statement after their death about how the whole thing was indeed a hoax.

[Chanie]

Merry Mom, that’s my feeling about them too—that it was an elaborate hoax to make money.

I read that the Scotford fellow who “discovered” them was a magician and familiar with sleight-of-hand techniques.

See: http://www.religionnewsblog.com/4841...gys-great-hoax

The shame of it is that there may well be authentic artifacts of this nature in Michigan, but the hoax has cast a blanket of doubt over everything.

[Smell the Roses]

Chanie, thanks for that article. That reminds me that the reason that I had heard of this in recent years was because of that exhibit at the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing. I haven’t been there since the “artifacts” were put there in a new exhibit, and I was thinking about taking my children there again. That will be a good field trip for the fall and could start a discussion about genuine versus fraudulent archaeology. I am pretty sure the Michigan artifacts are on the same level as the Piltdown Man, but as you say, it puts a cloud over any such discoveries or claims.

I did a quick search to verify what I remembered and found that it was Scotford’s stepdaughter who signed the affidavit in 1911 that she had seen him creating the artifacts.